Likelihood to Recommend

AdStage

AdStage is great if you're an agency or an in-house marketer managing a lot of ad budget, a lot of campaigns, or a large number of clients and you want to get the day-to-day tasks cleared to focus on higher-brain-stem tasks. Bid and budget management are replaced by rules. Holiday sales are replaced with flighting. All of your team members can log in, access their accounts, set up their reports and have them send to clients without having to lift a finger.

Ad display and retargeting segmentation

Sequence targeting

Ad dashboards

Ad performance reports

Ad conversion tracking

AdStage

9.0

ownerIQ

10.0

Ad attribution reporting

AdStage

8.3

ownerIQ

10.0

Cross-channel ad management

AdStage

8.4

ownerIQ

10.0

Ad forecasting and optimization

AdStage

8.3

ownerIQ

10.0

Pros

AdStage

AdStage has a great onboarding process. We have a dedicated support rep who walked our entire team through each of the three major sections of AdStage, talked about use cases and even recorded the training so we could provide it to other, future team members.

The real power of AdStage for us is in the Automation. You can set up rules for when to do things like increase budget or raise bids on certain ad channels. If something is doing well, push more money to it without ever logging in. Likewise, if something is tanking it gets turned off without you having to be at your computer. It frees up our team to focus on more strategic, creative endeavors by handling the "grunt work".

The ability to create custom metrics is a real plus. Sometimes, even with systems as advanced as Google and Facebook are, they just don't understand how to set up what you want to measure. Maybe I want to know the cost for all purchases across apps and my website? AdStage's custom metrics let me design that, and then use it in my reports, dashboards or rules.

Cons

AdStage

It's software, so glitches happen. And when those glitches happen, you need to talk to Support. While the Support team is really helpful, not reading from a script or just looking in the Help docs, there's often a severe lag time of hours or even days. That can be crushing when the glitch is affecting your ad campaigns that are spending money right now.

Setting up reports can be really frustrating if you want to customize them at all. If you want your Facebook Ads widget to only report on certain campaigns, there's no ability to filter by a naming convention or launch date, you just have to select every campaign manually. It's a bit like Magento—powerful, but working within the system can be really time-consuming.

Right now, AdStage focuses on Google & Facebook. So if you run ads on Snapchat, Pinterest, or Taboola you're kinda out of luck. They rolled out some LinkedIn stuff recently, and they say those other networks are on the way, but it's a little way that the software could get better.

ownerIQ

Likelihood to Renew

AdStage

AdStage 8.0

Based on 1 answer

AdStage has been great and the only reason we wouldn't renew is if we decided to build this all out internally for API access. But, customer services is great, the product is great and I'd definitely recommend it.

ownerIQ

Support

AdStage

AdStage 10.0

Based on 1 answer

AdStage had great support. They got back to me quickly every time, they always had or found an answer for what I was looking for, they took my feedback well, and they were knowledgeable with the platform and any issues I had. I have worked with a lot of other companies that are slow and AdStage definitely isn't one of them.

ownerIQ

Alternatives Considered

AdStage

I'm actually not aware of a ton of direct competitors for what AdStage is doing right now. As mentioned before, they have some great integrations for deep analytics, they bring all of the different vendors together in one central place and they have some awesome automation tools that I have not seen around.